Doctors say it’s a miracle that toddler survived ninth-floor fall

Nino Martin Chain. Courtesy of Florencia Nunez

Buenos Aires– The doctors at the Children’s Hospital in San Miguel, Argentina, find no explanation for the quick recovery of Martin Chain – a three-year-old boy who fell from the ninth floor when he was playing on the balcony of his apartment.

The June 7 accident left the boy on the verge of death. However, he only took 20 days to recover and shows no signs of long-term complications.

“I was working when I got a voice mail from my husband Maximo. He was screaming. He told me that Martin had fallen off the balcony,” the child’s mother, Florencia Núñez, told the local Clarin newspaper.

The day of the accident, Martin’s father was fixing something to eat when the little boy went by himself out to the balcony and climbed up onto the railing while playing. Martin then fell almost 100 feet down to the courtyard of the building with nothing breaking the impact.

The father rushed down to Martin and brought him to the Children’s Hospital in Tucuman, where he received immediate care. The doctors were stunned to see the little boy was conscious and crying, but without any broken bones.

However, Martin still suffered from trauma to the abdomen and skull, as well as a pulmonary contusion which caused breathing problems for him. For weeks he was under an induced coma, connected to an artificial respirator and feeding tubes.

Florencia said that in face of her son’s serious condition, “we didn’t stop praying and Piti gradually began to get better. One day while I was singing to him a song to the Virgin, he finally woke up.”

From that moment, Martin began to recover. He first went to intermediate care, then they took him off the respirator and he was finally discharged.

“He just has a few problems walking, but it’s nothing permanent. With physical therapy he can make a 100 percent recovery,” hospital director Cristina García de Alabarse, told Clarin.

“He will have to continue with a psychologist, and physical checkups for a while, but we don’t expect he’ll have major problems long term. It’s incredible.”

Despite being “a woman of science,” Garcia says she has never heard “of a similar case, it is, at the least, unusual that a person could fall from such a height and have so few aftereffects.”

“There are times that for us professionals, there’s nothing left but to put ourselves in God’s hands. I’m Catholic and I believe that miracles exist. Something happened there,” she said.